Is the song of the nightingale mirthful or melancholy? is a question that has been discussed so often, that anything new on the subject might be considered superfluous, were it not that the very fact of the discussion is in itself a curiosity worthy of attention. The note in dispute was heard with equal distinctness by Homer and Wordsworth; and indeed there are few poets of any age or country who have not, at one time or other in their lives, had the testimony of their own ears as to its character. Whence, then, this difference of opinion? Listen to Thomson's unqualified assertion, given with the seriousness of an affidavit: ----'all abandoned to despair, she sings Her sorrows through the night, and on the bough Sole sitting still at every dying fall Takes up again her lamentable strain Of winding wo; till wide around the woods Sigh to her song and with her wail resound.' Then Homer in the _Odyssey_, through Pope's paraphrase: 'Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen, To vernal airs attunes her varied strains.' Virgil, as rendered by Dryden: ----'she supplies the night with mournful strains And melancholy music fills the plains.' Milton, too: ----'Philomel will deign a song In her sweetest, saddest plight, Smoothing the rugged brow of night, While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke Gently o'er the accustom'd oak: Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly-- Most musical, most melancholy.' And again in _Comus_: ----'the love-lorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.' And Shakspeare makes his poor banished Valentine congratulate himself, that in the forest he can ----'to the nightingale's complaining note Tune his distresses and record his wo. We might go on much longer in this strain. We might give, likewise, the mythological cause assigned for the imputed melancholy, and add that some, not content with this, represent the bird as leaning its breast against a thorn-- 'To aggravate the inward grief, Which makes its music so forlorn.' But we would rather pause to admit candidly, that two of the above witnesses might be challenged--Virgil and Thomson; who indeed should be counted but as one, for the author of the _Seasons_, in the lines quoted, has translated, though not so closely as Dryden, from the _Georgics_ of the Latin poet. If you will read the passage--it matters not whether in Virgil, Dryden, or Thomson--you will perceive that it is a special occurrence that is spoken of: no statement whatever is made as to the character of the nightingale's ordinary song. Thomson, in the course of his humane and touching protest against the barbarous art: 'through which birds are ---- by tyrant man Inhuman caught, and in the narrow cage From liberty confined, and boundless air,'